David Deming

Reflecting on that conversation, where have you shifted or have you shifted?

So right after we recorded our podcast, the Dean of Harvard College, David Deming, who was rapidly becoming

my

favorite economist, he went on Plain English with Derek Thompson and they had a similar conversation.

Even at the top end, that's about two and a half hours a week.

In the US, a different team, Alexander Bick, Adam Blandin and David Deming, got 5.5% for users, a bit over two hours.

So, hours, not days, and those are people's own estimates.

Second number, and this is the one.

Not an easy thing to do at universities either.

We had David Deming on this show a few months ago, and we talked about what I think is a really knotty problem of how do you teach artificial intelligence in a educational community that should be all about making thinking difficult so that people struggle at college so they grow the muscles they can use when they graduate.

But on the one hand, it seems if you teach with too much AI at the Harvard's and Wharton's of the world and every other, you know, the Virginia Tech's and University of Michigan's, then you are automating the process by which people become more intelligent.

And that means they're going to end up dumber than they otherwise were.

Because the piece does, and it's the most interesting part, everybody dunks on meetings.

But a 2026 study of more than 9,000 workers in Norway, led by Harvard economist David Deming and based on data from the survey company Norstat, found that meeting intensity was positively associated with later wage growth and on-the-job learning.

the theory is that meetings put you in the room with more senior colleagues and that's how knowledge actually transfers you learn by being there now the big caveat stated plainly the study is correlational it can't prove the meetings caused the raises maybe the people getting invited to meetings were already on the up but the authors land on a line i'm going to be stealing for the rest of my life meetings are the broccoli of work widely disliked but probably good for us anyway and here's why i paired these two stories and it's not a cute transition it's the actual argument anthropic just told us that in an ai saturated company the scarce resource becomes human judgment and the response is more face-to-face coordination meeting science tells us that face-to-face coordination is also exactly how a junior person becomes a senior person The Norway study's whole point is that the room is where the learning happens.

So the company that cuts juniors and leans on senior judgment is, maybe without noticing, kicking out the latter.

The obvious question is, how do we redesign what we teach people and how we assess whether they've learned those things? Should people still be learning how to write? Should universities be teaching them how to use AI tools in order to do the most impressive research they can? What we put in the place of the final papers and take-home exams that were a huge part of assessment in an age where that is just encouraging them to cheat on their assessments.

But more fundamentally, does the university still have a place in a world of AI? Um, do we still need human beings to be employed as professors in order to be able to research when AI can increasingly do a lot of meaningful research? And is there going to be a financial basis for universities from the salaries that its graduates go on to make, from the tuition that their employed parents can pay if AI is fundamentally undermining white-collar work? Well, to address these fundamental questions about the future of higher education, I invited onto the podcast David Deming.

Uh, David is the Dean of Harvard College.

He is also a labor economist who has been researching, um, skills, higher education, artificial intelligence for a long time before becoming dean.

Uh, this is one of our points of genuine disagreement.

And secondly, I ask him about how Harvard is faring under the Trump administration.

Has Harvard managed to weather the, uh, attacks from the Trump administration? Will we remember this period as an important deviation in Harvard's history, or is it going to end the annals of university as no more than a footnote? [upbeat music] David Deming, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

This also helps prepare them for a world that really needs those kind of skills.

In her reporting on AI in education, Beth McMurtry spoke with David Deming, the dean of Harvard College.

And as Beth explains, Deming put out a call for educators to think about the value of education now that AI exists.

higher education no longer has a monopoly on expertise.

But then everyone already knew that.

A paper from Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman brings the math.

Quote, Jerry Tan: "If you *only* use SAT to admit to elite colleges, share of admits from top one percent income falls 15.8%.

Right arrow, nine point nine percent and representation from less than two hundred thousand dollars rises by plus eight point eight percent, with no reduction in post-college outcomes.

But then everyone already knew that.

A paper from Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman brings the math.

Jerry

Tan, if you only used SAT to admit to elite colleges, share of admits from top 1% income falls 15.8% to 9.9%, and representation from under $200,000 rises by plus 8.8%, with no reduction in post-college outcomes.